Have you ever had a dream that has kind of just sat there for years and years and years and you’ve almost forgotten about it because so much happened in life that the dream just kind of got put on the back burner? For me, one of these dreams has been to run a Bed and Breakfast that could also be used as a refuge for those needing one for the short term. We contemplated running an Air B&B out of our home in Ontario, but we didn’t have a separate unit and I wasn’t comfortable with strangers having reign of our own living quarters…especially with a child in the house. I was also in a season of complete and utter exhaustion, a result of PTSD and Adrenal Fatigue. I couldn’t imagine hosting guests without crashing for days afterwards.


When we moved back to Alberta, the thought didn’t even occur to me because our house is under major renovations and it made no sense. We’ve lived here for a year and the little house beside ours has sat vacant that whole time. This spring it came up for sale, and my mind started dreaming again. What if we bought that little house, renovated it, and turned it into an Air B&B meets short term lodging, meets refuge, meets craft/event house?We knew it was a foreclosure so we’d be dealing with a bank, which is often messy. The price wasn’t quite what we had been hoping for, but we went and looked at it anyhow. It was perfect for my dream. Over time, the price dropped and dropped some more, but we couldn’t make the numbers work so that we were comfortable. The night we decided we just couldn’t do it because of the numbers, we received two phone calls, which resulted in the numbers working in our favour. What now? We’d just come to a place of peace about the numbers not working and now they were working beyond what we could have imagined.


We looked at the house again. We went up for prayer at church in regards to the decision before us. We prayed some more and crunched more numbers. Then we made an offer and because it is a foreclosure, there was no time limit on when they had to accept or deny offers by.  There were three offers on the house and ours was not the highest. They asked if we wanted to reconsider our bid. We didn’t. This went on for what felt like weeks and the house was still not sold, so we made another offer, pending financing—which should be no issue with a 40% down payment.


Everything was good to go. Financing should be easy because we’d already gone through it all 4 months prior and nothing had changed in our financial life.  Then I got a phone call saying my perfect credit had dropped to beyond less than perfect because of a 3 month late payment on my cell phone. What? I don’t every recall a late payment since we do all our bills through automatic withdrawal.  Then I remembered, my credit card number had been compromised in February. At the time,  I immediately changed any payments going to my credit card and contacted my cell phone provider to let them know. There were no issues. My bill always came back saying I had made full payments. Until May when I got a bill saying I had an outstanding payment from February! What? So, they contacted the credit bureau and there went my credit history. Financing to buy the house was denied because of this error that was completely out of my control. I had done everything in my power to switch things over and do the right thing. This could be fixed, but not quickly enough for this house purchase.